Rodchenkov
According to former doping, mastermind turned whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov he said no Russian athletes should be allowed to take part in the postponed Tokyo Olympics next year. The architect of the country’s infamous state-sponsored doping scandal told news reporters that the country had not changed despite being banned from all major sporting events for four years in December for manipulating laboratory data.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has because of that ruled that Russian athletes from participating in the 2021 Japan Olympic even if they prove they are clean. In his first broadcast interview since the decision, Rodchenkov, the former head of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory, said: “It should be an absolute blanket ban without any excuses or admissions of athletes.”
He further said: “The same person who was smuggling and swapping samples during Sochi [the 2014 Winter Games], they were falsifying all documentation. “It was a progression in falsifying, day by day, of this data an incredible fraud of unspeakable proportion. It shows the country learns absolutely nothing.”
Russia’s Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) was declared non-compliant for doctoring laboratory data handed over to investigators last year. It had to provide the information to body in-charge as a condition of its controversial reinstatement in 2018 after a three-year suspension for a cheating conspiracy across the “vast majority” of Olympic sports.
Russia as a country has repeatedly denied all the claims against them and said the unprecedented four-year sanction is excessive, unfair and politically motivated. The Russians have appealed against a punishment that rules it out of both the Tokyo Games and the 2022 football World Cup but it will be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (Cas) in November.
Grigory Rodchenkov said Russian athletes should not be allowed to participate in forthcoming Tokyo 2021 he spoke via Zoom from an undisclosed location in the US where he has been in hiding for the past five years and shrouded in a scarf, sunglasses and hat to keep his changed identity secret, Rodchenkov believes he is now “unrecognisable”, has also changed his behaviour.
Rodchenkov moved to the US from Russia in 2015 with evidence of the state-sponsored doping regime that he planned the evidence led to Russia being banned from the Olympics and he has been in hiding ever since, saying he still fears what the Russian reprisals from the Russian state.
With his story already the subject of Oscar-winning documentary Icarus, Rodchenkov has now written an autobiography chronicling his life and the elaborate nature of doping procedures at the 2014 Winter Olympics, where positive urine samples were swapped for clean ones through a hole in his laboratory wall.
The Rodchenkov Affair includes an extraordinary claim that the Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles because Russian officials feared their doping would be exposed. Rodchenkov has previously apologised to British athletes for his role in tarnishing the integrity of the London 2012 Olympics by helping Russian athletes to cheat.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic was postponed due to the global pandemic coronavirus which started and in China and then spread across the Asian continent with Japan inclusive. The committee sat and said if they cant find a vaccine then the game should be postponed until they finally gets one.